Cannon, Delores (1931-)

Delores Cannon, hypnotist and past-life therapist, was born in 1931 in St. Louis, Missouri. She grew up there and in 1951 married a career navy man. She spent the next 20 years as a navy wife and the mother of four children. In 1968 her husband, who was an amateur hypnotist, stumbled across the phenomenon of past lives during a session with a woman who had a weight problem. Her husband retired in 1970 and they moved to the Ozark Mountain area of Arkansas. As her children reached adulthood, she used her new free time to study hypnosis and the idea of reincarnation. She developed her own techniques that seemed to be effective in releasing information in those who allowed her to hypnotize them.

At one point during the 1980s, an entity began to speak through one of her subjects who claimed to be Nostradamus, the fifteenth-century author of a number of prophetic poems. When the woman came out of her hypnotic state she was reluctant to continue but agreed to one additional session. Nostradamus indicated that he would be able to speak through different people hypnotized by Cannon and gave her a method to establish contact and to assure her that it was indeed he who was communicating. Over the next years he communicated through no less than a dozen people and discussed the meanings of his prophecies. These communications became the basis of a three-volume series, Conversations with Nostradamus, the first volume of which appeared in 1979.

Cannon has also used hypnosis to explore past history, and has concluded that much of what is taught as history in the schools is incorrect or distorted. It is also boring and dry. On the other hand, history as treated in novels and movies is so romanticized as to bear little resemblance to what actually occurred. She has offered as an alternative the rich record of experiences that have come through some of her subjects who have recounted their existence in previous incarnations. Separate books have, for example, treated life in the time of Jesus and his association with the Essenes and the experience of Hiroshima as World War II closed. The 1994 volume Legends of the Starcrash recounts the life of an ancient tribe of Native Americans who had a legend of their progenitors coming to Earth on a spaceship from another galaxy.

During her 20 years of work, Cannon has also explored the UFO abduction phenomenon and has cooperated with the Mutual UFO Network.

Sources:

Cannon, Delores. Conversations with Nostradamus. 3 vols. Huntsville, Ark.: Ozark Mountain Publishers, 1989-1992.

——. The Custodians: Beyond Abduction. Huntsville, Ark.: Ozark Mountain Publishers, 1998.

——. Jesus and the Essenes. Huntsville, Ark.: Ozark Mountain Publishers, 1999.

——. The Legend of Starcrash. Huntsville, Ark.: Ozark Mountain Publishers, 1994.

——. They Walked with Jesus: Past Life Experiences. Huntsville, Ark.: Ozark Mountain Publishers, 1999.